On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art

by Patricia McDonnell

American artists in the early decades of the 20th century found rich inspiration in vaudeville halls, revue theatres and moving-picture houses. The spectacular new visual attractions in these venues, emerging partly as a result of such technological advances as electrical lighting of the stage and the invention of motion pictures, emboldened artists to translate the arresting stimuli to their own medium. This illustrated work is devoted to American artists' responses to film, popular theatre, and other urban amusements from 1890 to 1930. The volume presents more than 100 paintings, drawings, watercolours and photographs that convey the highly-charged experience of attending vaudeville, early moving-picture shows, and other forms of popular amusements. These works of art reveal much about the beginnings of modernity in the United States and about how artists in early 20th-century America searched for new pictorial vocabularies to express the profound change and dynamism of their time. The contributors to the volume represent a wide variety of expertise - from art history to film to theatre - and they examine works by such key artists as Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Walt Kuhn, Everett Shinn and John Sloan, each of whom found a different formal and stylistic means to portray popular entertainment and, along the way, what it meant to be modern.

219 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2002

Reviews

[MH · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous art book with photographs, some schematics, and drawings and paintings from early American modernists, centering on Vaudeville and pre-WWI movies. The art alone makes this book worthwhile, but it's accompanied by ten excellent scholarly essays from art historians and experts in early American entertainment - important writers in the field like Robert C Allen and David Nasaw, and C Lance Brockman provides a great, surprising essay about oddball attempts to combine technology and 360 degree artistic immersion. The texts and the images work beautifully together, constructing an argument about how the worlds of popular performance and visual art influence one another, and how both speak to growing American modernity, and the whole thing is valuable, interesting, and absolutely lovely.